Parallel paths of victim, killer

Henry Lee, a young immigrant student at Virginia Tech, liked to wear a jade necklace, one of the last vestiges of his family's past in southeast Asia.

In most ways, though, Lee was a product of his new country. Known for his American slang and disarming wit, he wore Sears clothing that he bought with his employee discount.

The promising life of Lee, 20, was ended last week by gunman Seung Hui Cho, 23, a fellow student with a strikingly similar background.

Both were boyhood immigrants from Asia whose parents sought opportunity in Virginia. Both struggled with culture shock as they were urged to engage and succeed. Both encountered a language barrier and stereotypes. And both made it to Virginia Tech.

But while Lee overcame social challenges, Cho withdrew from them, beset with mental illness that led to the rampage last Monday in which he killed Lee and 31 others, then turned the gun on himself.

Cho, who seemed detached from those around him, renewed his resident alien status in 2003. Lee, on the other hand, became a U.S. citizen last year, changed his name from Henh to Henry, and made an emotional speech at his high school graduation about the obstacles he had overcome.

"He was the one who made it -- who had his life taken away by the one who didn't," said Gloria Moore, Lee's former Sears supervisor in his Blue Ridge hometown of Roanoke.

The contrast between Cho and the high-achieving immigrants like Lee who were among his victims has taken on a nightmarish cast for some immigrant families striving to find their identities, their voices and their place as they raise their children in a new land.

"We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in," Cho's sister, Sun Kyung Cho, said in a family statement. "We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

Cho's silence would play a defining role in his immigrant journey. Language poses the first and most lasting stress for immigrant children, said Dr. Louis Kraus, a forensic psychiatrist and chief of adolescent psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Once mastered, it can throw in stark relief the differences between Americanized children and old-world parents in even the most adaptive families. In the end, his silence may have veiled his mental illness.

"For each child the process can be tremendously different, depending on what their coping strategies are, and what their potential mental health issues are," Kraus said.

While Lee embodied the American dream, Cho somehow slipped away despite a family's love and support, stunning a community with a shared respect for hard work and investment in education and success.

"We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost," Cho's sister told The Associated Press. "This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person."

The Lee family -- who spelled their name "Ly" until gaining citizenship in America -- fled communist Canton, China, for the impoverished southern Vietnamese city of Hai Ninh in 1954. Henh Ly, the second-youngest of 10 children, was born in Vietnam and lived there until age 7, long enough to remember tying string to bugs and being terrified of moving.

The Lees reached America in 1994. They were resettled with the help of the U.S. government in the mountain city of Roanoke; their large family was among only a handful of Asians there.

Once there, Lee's father, Song Ly, worked as a packer for the Home Shopping Network, and his older siblings supported the family by polishing nails and sanding floors.

In Korea, Cho and his older sister grew up in a two-room apartment in Seoul, where their parents ran a small bookstore that turned an even smaller profit, relatives told the AP.

The family arrived in the United States in 1992 when Cho was 8, and was drawn to Fairfax County, Va., home to a large and growing community of Korean immigrants.

As they worked to send their children to competitive schools, the Chos realized another part of the American dream: They bought an eight-room townhouse in a good school district in Centreville for $145,000 in 1997.

Cho's parents worked in dry cleaners, said a woman who ran another Centreville cleaner.

"They were poor," said the woman, who asked to be identified only as Ahn for fear of retaliation over association with the Chos.

Experts see the first clues to Cho's later problems in his childhood silence, which uniformly unnerved observers.

He spoke so little as a boy that Korean relatives feared he might be mute. A great aunt told reporters the family learned he might have autism -- a diagnosis disputed by psychiatric experts and not reflected in medical records released by Virginia Tech and investigators.

And though Korea has a sophisticated health-care system, questions have been raised if perhaps more traditional Koreans of rural upbringing -- like Cho's father -- might be less likely to seek help from it.

But such an attitude is rare in Korea and less so in America, said Sang Hyun Lee, the Kyung-Chik Han Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. What does exist for Korean immigrants is an expectation to succeed, he said.

"The first-generation immigrants are trying so hard to make ends meet, to reach the so-called American dream. All first-generation immigrants -- and especially in Korean immigrant society -- they'd like to send their kids to Ivy League schools, and nothing else but Ivy League would do," said Lee.

"Koreans have problems, just like anybody," he said. "He [Cho] was influenced by all kinds of social contexts."

In that context, Cho's tendency to withdraw grew worse after his family moved, relatives said.

Both families strongly encouraged their children's education.

The Cho children seemed on the right track. Cho's older sister graduated from Princeton University in 2004, and the younger Cho had gotten into Virginia Tech, despite remaining silent in class discussions at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. -- perhaps, said former classmates, because he was ridiculed for his accented English.

Those reactions from his peers then and in college may have contributed to his sense of victimhood, Kraus said. They also reinforced an isolation that wouldn't be fully appreciated until too late.

The outgoing Lee, meanwhile, reveled in the academic and social environment of William Fleming High School in Roanoke. His mother suggested he go to medical school, though Lee hated blood and was thinking about engineering.

Teachers respected his mathematical bent. Co-workers at Sears, where he worked as a clerk in the bedding department, loved his sense of humor. Friends say he reached out through text messages, phone calls and posts on Facebook.com. He went bowling with classmates. His family watched this and nicknamed him "White Boy."

His stellar grades earned him the second spot academically in the Class of 2006, entitling Lee to deliver a salutatorian speech on graduation day.

In that speech, he asked classmates to imagine his former life: His parents fleeing oppression only to land in a civil war. His travel to a place he knew only from television. Knowing no English, having parents absorbed with work, and having no permanent home.

"Twelve years ago," Lee told classmates, "I was that outcast."

But Lee had transformed, said his older brother Joe.

"I would ask him, 'Why do you not have Asian friends?'"

He said his brother told him he hung out mostly with whites who were elite students "because I am like them."

Lee went to Virginia Tech last fall on a full scholarship underwritten in part by local donors.

The paths of Cho and Lee diverged radically at the Blacksburg campus of Virginia Tech.

Campus police intervened twice when female students complained Cho was stalking them in November and December 2005. Two days before the second complaint, a Virginia magistrate ordered him temporarily hospitalized for posing a danger to himself and others.

As Lee earned a 3.9 grade point average, Cho wrote two one-act plays for an English class last semester. The plays, "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone," have been posted online and are full of disturbingly violent images.

Investigators and classmates paint a final image of diverging paths: While Lee sweated over an electrical engineering project, Cho calmly purchased the two handguns he would use to kill, wrote a rambling manifesto to justify his murderous spree, and spent six days preparing a video monologue that would speak for him beyond the grave.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he said in the videos. "You had 100 billion chances and ways to have avoided today. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

The American story he shared with Lee ended in Room 211 of Norris Hall, where the two were believed to have encountered each other for the first time.

Henry Lee died with a bullet in the back of his head. Seung Hui Cho took his own life minutes later.